Yes, good afternoon everybody. I have a couple of questions if possible.

The first is an update about the third-quarter business trend, especially for Trade, and maybe some qualitative comment on the Education business. The second question instead is a follow-up to what you have told us during the presentation, a bit more color maybe if possible on the guidance, given that the comments seem to be very supportive.

Whatever further information is more than welcome. Thank you.

Thank you for the questions, Fabio. Now, let's start with Trade third quarter.

Visibility on Q3 is just 3 weeks. This afternoon, we will get to know something about week number 30, we are closing the third week of July, and what's happening is more or less what we had envisaged in our expectations at the beginning of 2026 when we communicated to the market.

We had a very strong 2026, obviously supported by the Library Fund, and we all publishers agree on saying that there is going at the end of June the end of this effect. The positivity between the end of January and the end of June no longer includes the positive effect coming from resources, public resources from the Library Fund.

The first half closes, and with the beginning of the second, two things happen: the first is that the resources from the Library Fund effect is over, and the second is that the reference market of 1 year ago changes when you move from a 1 first semester with a weak trend in the book market in general to a beginning of July when, for the first time last year, the market started growing again. We're starting comparing with a market which is growing without any support in terms of extra support resources, sorry.

What I can tell you is that the market is no longer mid-single-digit growth as in the first half, but rather positions itself with a growth anyway. The last week, which will be published today, gives a 1.something in growth, something that wasn't given for granted.

Basically, if we got to the end of June with a market dynamic that was already 5 extra points in terms of more value vis-a-vis last year, and should we confirm our outlook to the end of the year, i.e., +2% approximately, which was the guidance, the expectations we had announced, we are at +5% and even over. In the month of July, we should get to 4%, 4.5%, 4.3% maybe, and the data today sees the market moving from 5.1% at the end of June to 4.3%, 4.5% at the end of July.

We expect the market to change, despite the fact that last year it started growing rather than dropping. Last point, which is an off-beat, it's more difficult to make a forecast, is the fact that during this first half, we've had an extraordinary trend of all physical channels, and not just independent bookshops that captured a lot of the resources from the Library Fund, and the structural weakness of e-commerce, Amazon included, that continued with the -3%, -4% we had in 2025.

The last 2 months, e-commerce, between May and June, e-commerce started realigning and stopped losing value. Basically, given that every time e-commerce loses part of the value compared to the previous year, the market, the physical market cannot really capture what the e-commerce is losing in the book business, having on our side also an e-commerce which in the second half is not negative, but rather stable, could bring about some positive surprise.

As to the guidance, our comment—sorry, on Education, there was a question on Education as well. On Education, basically, we've had a two-phase year, and by this, I mean that we did better than what we expected in secondary schools, and we did worse than we expected in primary schools.

The impact of the better result in secondary school and of the worse result in primary schools probably in terms of revenues will balance off. What will not be balanced off is marginality, because the marginality of primary schools is very modest, whilst marginality for secondary school, first and second-grade secondary school, is very important.

What we get from the educational business comes from that segment, and this is the reason why there, obviously, our investments are always higher than in primary schools. Final results: well, we expect this campaign to be a bit better than our targets in terms of margins.

Probably nothing much will change in terms of revenues. A good piece of news comes from Hoepli Education, we just acquired, because there we saw part of Hoepli's market share would be lost because of the difficult months, these difficult last few months, but instead, that 2.5% of market share Hoepli had has been, according to current estimates, kept and maintained despite the fact that it took months to acquire the company.

I'd say that all in all, ours is not a negative outlook for Education. All in all, we are confirming the guidance we provided at the beginning of the year, also because 6 months still need to go by, and it's the most important one given our seasonality.

We have some uncertainties as to the war and the various geopolitical macro issues, the worries all industries have basically. There's no doubt that the support and contribution given by Hoepli Scuola positions us in the high range of what we've indicated in terms of revenues, margins, and cash flow when we talked about end-of-year targets.

Thank you.

Yes, good afternoon. I have a question on the new opening of physical stores.

Can you give us an update about the rollout and give us some indication about the performance of recently opened bookstores? Thank you.

Retail new openings, we are talking about just a few weeks. We are faster than the roadmap we had foreseen for 2026.

Do take into account that when you start the new year, locations where we think we might open within that same year have already been found. We have no surprise which would go in discontinuity vis-a-vis expectations.

Obviously, the first few months for all new openings suffer from the fact that you need to create a relationship with the population surrounding those areas. Numbers, as you've seen, are positive, are important, because if I remember correctly, the direct points of sales at the end of June are 89, also including bookstores for comics we manage directly.

Now we are at the end of July, and we have two extra openings that had not been considered in those numbers, in Cagliari and, if I'm not mistaken, Livorno, the second one. Then there's a third one that has been foreseen and it's going to open next week, I think.

The process and the strategy to strengthen our presence in the book market with direct opening of bookstores continues, no hesitation, and numbers confirm this, especially if we look at the fact that besides our important performance in retail for books, and not only for books, besides this phenomenon, you also see a general market trend in the first half that gives an 8% more than that same channel 1 year ago. Part of it is coming from resources from the Library Fund, but another part of it is connected to the channel.

The channel of bookstores, be them chains and/or independent bookstores, in the right locations and with the right size and formats are an important business source and don't require continuous recapitalization. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Good afternoon.

Couple of questions on my side. First, digital sales that went really well in the first half, especially audiobooks.

I wanted to understand what are the trends you're observing, whether there are any specific promotions or whether this simply reflects a general market trend. Then I also wanted you to confirm about the weight of these digital products on the total sale of books.

Less than 10% is digital, right? This performance, can it help cut the EBITDA margin, which has increased vis-a-vis last year?

Second question, on the Media division, that kept recording a good performance also in the second quarter, again with joint sales. Could we expect a similar trend in the second half of the year, or will the benefit of these initiatives be more limited in the second half compared to the first half?

Thank you.

Thank you. I start with books trade, and the very positive performance, as you rightly said, of our digital products, both e-books that grow, not much, but still keep growing, and especially of the audiobooks.

The trend is significantly growing. We grow high single digit overall of the two digital channels, and do take into account that now audiobooks represent about 50% of the total value.

We're talking about €3 million in revenues, 2.7 if I remember correctly, and with high marginality of audiobooks compared to the €7 million, 6.something—total is 9, 2.7, 1/3 therefore, is audiobooks. Audiobooks represent 50% of revenues for e-books, the total is 1/3 and 2/3.

The growth is very significant in audiobooks, because we're talking about +30%. It's small numbers, but they're absolutely in line with the growth rates of other international markets.

The real difference is connected to the potential of audiobooks in Italy, a potential which until today, given the habits of Italians, the idea of having a passive reading through listening compared to the active reading of a paper and/or digital book that make Italians differently from the Germans, for example, and/or those from the Nordics and very many other extra-European countries, in reality have non-significant shares. Today we reach about €9 million in revenues with audiobooks and e-books put together, which is less than 10% if I remember correctly.

Yes, it's 7% of pure editorial revenues, the traditional book part. We have a huge potential ahead of us, because basically the audiobooks market in Italy is relatively small compared to other countries, as I was saying.

Italians are less prone towards audiobooks, and the profiles are totally different from those who read paper books. A strong reader of paper books is usually a woman from Northern Italy.

The main listener of audiobooks in Italy is in general a male coming from the South of Italy. This also allows you to understand why, as it happened in other countries, audiobooks, differently from e-books, do not cannibalize the market of books.

If you sell an e-book, probably the person reading that digital version of the book will never buy it in paper, whilst people buying audiobooks probably would never have bought the paper book. It's a market that grows at significant rates, but it's still small because it only represents 7% of the market.

The good piece of news is that officially in the domestic market, as it already happened in other markets in the US, in France last year, etc., we'll have Spotify starting this coming fall. You won't just have Audible, the Amazon Group, with an audiobook platform that represents almost 100% of the market, but there'll also be another player, a second important player, Spotify, which differently from what one might think, for audiobooks is much stronger than Audible, than Amazon, which in reality will probably lead to further investments, more marketing, and starts from a basis of customers which is much, much larger than that of Amazon Audible.

Basically from autumn onwards, all Italian publishers expect a more favorable situation for margins deriving from this digital product, and probably also an acceleration in the growth of the minutes people listen to audiobooks, and probably also an availability on the side of publishers to accelerate investments in audiobooks present in their libraries' offering. Probably November, we should start also in view of 2027 having better numbers, or numbers with better trends.

Second half of Media, I'll give you a good piece of news to a certain extent. It's been two joint sales connected to our magazines that made the difference in revenues and margins for Media.

One of the two series was the one linked to books that had already been published, Fatto in Casa da Benedetta, that were very many, were very successful, but that unfortunately with the first half finished. Then there's a second collection that's very satisfactory, and it's the other important lever for success in the first half, is the small cars, which will also continue in the second half of the year.

We'll keep on having a positive trend, maybe not as marked as in the first half, also in the second half. To Fabio Pavan, I wanted to say something else if I remember correctly.

He asked a question on schoolbooks. In the last 10 years, this is the first campaign coming from the Mondadori Group with its different publishing houses that performs better than the historic leader in the segment of first and second-grade secondary schools.

Historically, the important publisher who has always been a leader was obviously Zanichelli. Our group in this segment had never performed better than Zanichelli in terms of adoptions.

This year, instead, we did better. We are better than the historic leader of this segment that was and still is Zanichelli.

This is another point of pride we bring home this first half, apart from numbers, revenues, cash generation. I put it together with our success in winning the Premio Strega that dates back a few weeks.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much and congratulations.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. I have a question on the M&A situation.

Is there anything else you can tell us, something we might expect to see in the near future?

Here as usual, I leave the floor to Alessandro.

I don't know, you were very cautious, but I ask him to say what we should expect in the next few months after an intense activity in these last 12 months. Allow us to breathe for a moment, because the last 6, 7 months saw us announcing 3 transactions: the acquisition of Dema, the portfolio of 10 bookstores that were part of a company that had a franchising relationship with Mondadori, and vice versa now they've become points of sales; then we've announced the acquisition of the portal and we are now integrating it from the operational viewpoint; and the Hoepli transaction.

We're looking at very small things now in the retail area and in the digital area, but these are just interesting add-ons compared to the current perimeter, but they certainly won't have any material impact on our general set-up and on our results. We think we need a month's rest and then we'll start focusing again in looking for slightly more ambitious targets capable of having a stronger impact on our performance.

As usual, I agree with Alessandro, and I add, if you look at the growth in the first half this year deriving from the old perimeter at consolidated level and from the new perimeter, i.e., the very recent acquisitions, you see that both in terms of revenues and in terms of EBITDA, half of the growth is same perimeter and the other half comes from M&As. Let's enjoy this result that doubles the organic growth trend we're recording.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, and have a nice holiday. Thank you very much.

Thank you to all. We'll meet again in September.